Google's Paul Haahr On Patents For Learning SEO

Google's Paul Haahr, a lead ranking engineer at Google for 14+ years, had a nice conversation with the SEO community yesterday on Twitter.

It all started with a tweet from @Tony_DWM and it went into how sometimes trying to learn SEO tips from Google patents might be hard and potentially learning it from the full version of the quality raters guidelines might be more beneficial.

Here are some isolated tweets from the stream that I want to pull out:

@bill_slawski Also, what gets patented is a subset of what we do. There's a lot we treat as not worth patenting or "obvious."

This is Google trying to tell us that maybe, just maybe, patents can steer us in the wrong direction and if we want more actionable advice on what Google wants today is to keep up to date with the quality raters guidelines.